Alasdair is 5!!!!

This year saw Allie's first proper birthday party. We decided just to invite friends from school, as we noticed that when he's also with English speakers he tends to only talk to them. He also sees a lot of them because I hang out with the other English speaking mothers. He chose Olivia, Elisa, Liv, Eloy and Xavier who are all very nice children, which was a relief, because I know the obnoxious ones now. At 2:30 (sharp!) most of the mothers dropped off their children and ran! Xavier's mother came a bit later and stayed for coffee. So there we were, me and 6 raucous children, with 2 hours to kill. I had a vague timeline of festivities which somehow seemed to come together between the insanity. This included the old favourites of 'pin the tail on the donkey', 'musical chairs' and 'musical statues'. They also played their own French version of DuckDuckGoose. Children are much more cooperative when prizes are offered. After a lot of shouting about who was first and who really won, we had cake... and really 'badforyou' snacks : chips oozing msg, sausage rolls and fairy bread (white bread, no crusts, butter and hundreds and thousands on the top.yum).


Here's a clip of the other children singing Happy Birthday to Allie. L to R they are Olivia, Xavier, Liv, Allie, Elisa and Eloy.


After cake, presents were openned and they played till parents arrived. The last half hour had me a bit knackered because of the long day of planning and dealing with below:

Things would have been a bit different if Toby had been there, but he 'chose' Allie's birthday to upstage him with pneumonia. I took him to the doctor the evening before and she gave me a prescription for a radiograph the next day, if he had a bad night. It was pretty bad, and he was very tired and sad the next day. You can tell when Toby's really ill because he doesn't have the energy to be bad tempered! So on the morning of Allie's birthday, i took Tobe to the hospital and Walter took Allie to work (which he thoroughly enjoyed, luckilly). After the X-ray, we had a consult with the chief of radiology, then the chief of paediatrics and came home with a prescrip. for antibiotics, and some follow up appointments. During the conversation with the paediatrician I mentioned that Allie was having a party that day. She said "I don't think you should do that, as you may get all the other children sick". I replied "I can't possiblly not have a party for Allie. It's out of the question". "Well, you can try to keep Toby upstairs during the party". That's what we did. Walter had only come back from the US that day before and had jet lag, so he got quiet time with Tobe. They watched DVDs, played with trains, read books and slept, while mayhem reigned below! Sadly, no Walter and Toby in the video, though.

Toby's not having a party. We'll just have friends over as usual, but with added cake. He'll be into it soon enough.